Laptop COMPATIBILITY List.

[twipley]

Lenovo Thinkpad T420i works almost perfectly out of the box, save for some hiccups with wireless and integrated graphics.

Lenovo Thinkpad T430 over here, works great under Intel integrated graphics and Intel Centrino Wireless. Great part is no proprietary drivers have to be used! Everything basic is working out of the box. Meaning, most function keys, and for every job that needs to be done to meet the needs, works fine.

Interestingly, I have received a discount because I told them I did not want to buy Windows, that serves as a cost offset. Furthermore, upon receiving it I have just removed every partition, the Windows sticker, and then installed the latest version of Ubuntu. Nothing has been contaminated by proprietary software; this one is operating under an 100%-open-source-software philosophy.

[azangru]

Lenovo Thinkpad T430 over here, works great under Intel integrated graphics and Intel Centrino Wireless. Great part is no proprietary drivers have to be used! Everything basic is working out of the box. Meaning, most function keys, and for every job that needs to be done to meet the needs, works fine.

Interestingly, I have received a discount because I told them I did not want to buy Windows, that serves as a cost offset. Furthermore, upon receiving it I have just removed every partition, the Windows sticker, and then installed the latest version of Ubuntu. Nothing has been contaminated by proprietary software; this one is operating under an 100%-open-source-software philosophy.

Hi, there have been reports on this forum about random freezes due to the very recent Ivy Bridge (which require a kernel update to version 3.4) and about some problems with Pulseaudio. Do you experience anything of the sort on your machine?

Also, if you or anyone else could check the mini display port on the t430 - does it work OK? Does the sound go through this port as well?

[Kenneth David]

Hello. can someone that closely watches this thread tell me which laptop or manufacturer has been the most compatible with Ubuntu? also are there any that have dual hard drives?

[typhoon_tip]

Hello. can someone that closely watches this thread tell me which laptop or manufacturer has been the most compatible with Ubuntu? also are there any that have dual hard drives?

ThinkPad T400 series (T420/T430). Should find good prices in T420 with i3 or i5 (if you have lot of money... i7 !). You can remove the CD/DVD bay and install an adapter with an extra SSD or normal HDD.

[Kenneth David]

great, thank you that's perfect.

ThinkPad T400 series (T420/T430). Should find good prices in T420 with i3 or i5 (if you have lot of money... i7 !). You can remove the CD/DVD bay and install an adapter with an extra SSD or normal HDD.

[Mikeb85]

Lenovo Thinkpad T430 over here, works great under Intel integrated graphics and Intel Centrino Wireless. Great part is no proprietary drivers have to be used! Everything basic is working out of the box. Meaning, most function keys, and for every job that needs to be done to meet the needs, works fine.

Interestingly, I have received a discount because I told them I did not want to buy Windows, that serves as a cost offset. Furthermore, upon receiving it I have just removed every partition, the Windows sticker, and then installed the latest version of Ubuntu. Nothing has been contaminated by proprietary software; this one is operating under an 100%-open-source-software philosophy.

I just ordered a T530 (dual-core i7, intel graphics, centrino wireless, 1080p screen), and likewise, received a discount because I didn't want Windows as well (I've already got several windows licenses, and will just run it in Vbox anyway).

[twipley]

Hi, there have been reports on this forum about random freezes due to the very recent Ivy Bridge (which require a kernel update to version 3.4) and about some problems with Pulseaudio. Do you experience anything of the sort on your machine?

azangru, you are right -- there seems to be random freezes over here. Thanks for letting me know that upgrading to quantal would most likely be fixing that.

Concerning PulseAudio, I have not tested the audio much yet, so I cannot tell.

A quick search revealed that the DisplayPort port should support audio as well -- and should, with the adequate adapter, be compatible with HDMI inputs (out to an AV receiver, for example).

Overall, besides Ubuntu compatibility, laptop feels great, and robust. Basic screen works great for reading and word processing, and the keyboard feeling is top-notch -- the only downside being the key placement next to the arrow keys (PgUp and PgDn), although I am sure this is something I will get to adapt to.

[Bucky Ball]

Compaq 610
Xubuntu 12.04 LTS

It 'just works'! No prob with anything (including wireless which also just worked').

[blortuga]

Dell Inspiron 15R SE 7520

Ubuntu 12.04 (precise).

Where do I begin?
Device is a 15 inch display with 1080 lines.
8 GB RAM
Intel® Core™ i7-3612QM CPU @ 2.10GHz × 8
AMD Radeon HD 7700M Series graphics.
4 USB 3.0 ports, an hdmi port, and a vga port. sd reader, and DVD RW.
Has a nice backlit keyboard.

so, pretty much a beast.

I have had some experience with ubuntu (and redhat) servers, (on IBM hardware and in VMs) but not much desktop linux experience. Mostly, my experience has been Windows and Mac OS X.

Install went roughly okay.
Networking, audio, printing, etc. pretty much all worked out of the box.

I couldn't get any love out of the Radeon, until I went here:
http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubu...allation_Guide

And followed these instructions explicitly. I did not try the open source drivers. It took multiple attempts of removing and reinstalling to get this to work. (granted, I found several outdated versions of instructions first). Desktop cube works great.

I prefer the old GNOME look over Unity, so I spent a lot of time trying to configure Cinnamon, but I couldn't get themes to work consistently, and compiz was very crashy, so I went over to the dark side and learned to use Unity.

I installed the i8k-utils, but I found that if I set ENABLED=1 and set configure(auto) 1, (to enable the daemon), the automatic management of the fan didn't work at all, and the CPU temp shot up.

So, I have i8k-utils installed, and there is a process running. (correction: no "process"; I meant to say, I'm loading the kernel module). I can use i8kctl and i8kfan. And the fan pretty much scales up and down as needed.

I also installed lm-sensors, sensors (ran sensors detect), cpufreq, sensors applet, hddtemp. It's possible that one of these may be conflicting with i8kmon. . . ?

I tried to install gkrellm, but the gkrellm-i8k module seems to be missing in action.

I generally like to use the cpufreq applet to dial-down the cpus to 1.2 GHz, and that keeps the fans at a minimum, and temperature running around 46 C. 8 CPUs seems to be able to handle most loads at 1.2 GHz. When I am impatient, I'll set it to 2.10 explicitly, or OnDemand.

keys:
I couldn't really figure out how to make i8k-keys work, or really what the point of that tool is.
fn-keys include an external monitor switch, wifi, trackpad disable, brightness up/down, backlight toggle, audio back/play-pause/fwd, and volume down/up/mute. (all of which work) The windows key works the ubuntu panel. There are three "special" keys in the upper-right corner, one with gears on it, another with sort of a sound-wave, and another with an energy-star logo. If I recall correctly, from the manual, these are special function keys with links to crapware that dell installs on the bundled Windows instance. Someday, I'm going to try to figure out how to use these for some other function hotkeys. . .


Power management:
The laptop does not seem to pay any heed to the power management control panel settings, and pretty much goes to sleep after a certain amount of time, whether plugged in or not. (unless there is activity). I think this is probably a BIOS setting, which I have not thoroughly explored. The keyboard backlight will pop off at some pre-sleep state, and when I touch the trackpad, it comes back on.

Screen brightness:
At all but the minimum setting, this screen will burn your face to a cinder. It's seriously that bright. I guess it would be great to use outdoors on a sunny day.
I could not find any controls to set contrast, so I can't figure out how to even minimally color-profile this monitor. (I don't have a hardware calibrator, and, I miss Apple's very slick calibration tool). Dell doesn't have a profile for this screen on their website.

Conky:
This is a weird and wicked little app. I spent hours figuring out how to disable desktop widgets in Windows Vista, and hours configuring a custom conky theme for this laptop. I modified conky_orange.lua. I display (among the other standard fare) each cpu core individually, my wifi signal strength, (which varies greatly, depending on where I am, in my house), and I tried to add the instrumentation for temperatures and fans.
I had a very difficult time with hddtemp, which when displayed from .conkyrc, would just work fine, but when displayed from conky_orange.lua, would report the temperature one time, then "N/A", and then conky would spit out errors as it tried to calculate a percentage from a string. (BAD vm!). The more I tried to fix this in the unfamiliar lua code, the weirder the behavior got. This was fixing a symptom, and I saw that a bunch of other people were having the same problem with hddtemp not reporting consistently, so I gave up on that.
I also tried i8k_cpu_temp and i8k_right_fan_rpm, (there is no left fan). This caused conky to segfault. Even when I configured conky to run as a daemon (rendering fan-control broken). It would okay for a few minutes, then just crash. That piece of information is really the whole point of this conky rant.

Final note:
The webcam. . . it's nice. I guess. I'm not really into webcams, and this one seems provided as an afterthought. I installed cheese, and it worked just fine. So what is wrong with the webcam is that the lens has this little silver frame around it, set into the black plastic frame around the screen. This little silver frame is visibly cocked about 5-degrees counter-clockwise. It's crooked. I really have never seen anything quite like it, as far as a defect in a consumer-product goes. It's kind of unbelievable that this made it past QA inspection at the factory. But it functions fine, and the fact is, it was a clearance item, and I got a really great price on it. But I wonder if mine is the only example with this very visible defect, or if they're all like this, or what. Personally - it does not bother me. (not at all). But if you're the kind of person who may be bothered by something like that, then I'd advise you to pick a different brand. (or don't order it by mail).

[aPanzerIV]

OS: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
Make: Gateway
Model: MX-7118

What doesn't work: Wireless Card & AMD Cool n' Quiet